


you better sharpen up

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [8]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Chasind Hawke, Dragon Age II - Act 1, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Lowtown, POV Outsider, Red Hawke (Dragon Age), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, friendship?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 10:50:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19083529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: Some parts of Hawke? An open book. The rest, she keeps squirreled away, secrets held close to her chest, with her big biceps and bigger sword crossed in front of them to fend off intruders. It makes the storyteller in Varric itch.or, Hawke tends to her weapons, and Varric tries to get to the root of things. Set during Act 1.





	you better sharpen up

**Author's Note:**

> i don't remember writing this

The Hanged Man is convenient for a lot of reasons - dirt cheap rooms, dirtier cheaper ale, the lack of his brother, the proximity to his informants - and Varric has only rarely found himself regretting setting up there. Here are two more ways that the Hanged Man is convenient: it’s right around the corner from the old city slums and a hop-skip down from the Alienage, and it’s the first place Varric notices the dark Fereldan girl with the facial tattoos, washing dishes with Norah and scowling at anyone who looks at her. Varric won’t know the significance of these until almost a year after the Blight, but goddamn, are they significant.

That year brings with it a whole fuck-ton of revelations: Qunari in the city, on top of waves upon waves of refugees from down South; finally getting somewhere with Bartrand’s harebrained Deep Roads expedition plan; a letter from Bianca, that he got so drunk after receiving that he can’t remember what it says and he’s too much of a coward to look; and finally, and maybe most importantly, Hawke.

She’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a punch to the goddamned teeth. Not all of her, for sure - she’s easy to read, when you know her kind, and Varric has been rubbing elbows with scum long before she came to the city, just another mercenary in a city where swords sell faster than gold. He can tell that she’s a soldier, and that she’s been through some shit; he can tell that she hates small talk, and doesn’t know how to act around strangers; he can tell that she’s got fucked up ideas about family, and that she sees her sister as some weird extension of herself. Probably her mother, too, but Varric would have to see them together to be sure. Hell, he can’t relate. He thinks he and Bartrand are like two deepstalker mutts tied together at the neck, running in opposite directions; Hawke talks about Sunshine like she’s the only thing that matters in the whole of the Maker’s creation.

Some parts of Hawke? An open book. The rest, she keeps squirreled away, secrets held close to her chest, with her big biceps and bigger sword crossed in front of them to fend off intruders. It makes the storyteller in Varric itch, makes him want to learn every nook and cranny of her brain, wants to see her fall like a house of cards, a final tumbler falling into place after judicious application of a lockpick. Part of it is because he wants to make sure that he made a wise investment in choosing a potential business partner. And part of it is because he has a _feeling_ about her, some siren going off in his head, saying _hey, pay attention to this one._ Other people are going to start doing so, too, he feels, and he wants to have his story straight when they do.

He’s in his rooms, slowly making his way through a pitcher of red as he listens to a report from a couple of his runners: Coterie is making moves on Blondie down in the sewers, which he should probably do something about; if he wants to buy and resell forgeries of Orlesian art, the time is now and the de Launcets are buying; his editor found out about the body double thing, and wants his new chapters before the end of the month; Hawke is out on her doorstep again, after a screaming row that the whole block heard.

“She out there sharpening that sword again?” Varric asks, looking from his glass to the runner.

“She wasn’t when I ran past, but I’d bet my ears,” she says.

“Hmm,” says Varric, and he passes the girls their due, finishes his glass, and gets up to find his coat.

 

Looks like little Eloni will get to keep her ears, Varric thinks -- sure as anything, there Hawke is, sitting on the doorstep of Gamlen’s apartment block, sharpening her sword. There’s a group of skinny, dirty-kneed ten year olds kicking around a ball in the dirt courtyard, and they barely give him a second glance as he cuts through their match of kickball. Some of them are taller than him, which he hates, but he just shoots the goalkeeper a grin as he goes to sit on the steps next to Hawke.

She brings her whetstone down the blade sharply, but he doesn’t flinch at the noise.

“Bad day, Hawke?” he asks her, amiably.

“Get fucked,” she replies, tersely.

Varric presses a gloved hand to his chest. “Why, Hawke, you wound me,” he says, and raises an eyebrow when she lets out a ruthless _“Good”._ Definitely a bad day, then.

A minute passes, and Hawke puts down her whetstone, picking up a very worn rag that, from what he can see of the red embroidery around the edge, might have once been a shirt of Sunshine’s. She polishes the sword blade with the cloth and a nearly-empty bottle of sword oil, her shoulders tense and face remarkably open. Surprise, surprise: Hawke is upset.

“You wanna talk about it?” Varric asks after she’s spent some time giving herself a crick in the neck from how still she’s sitting.

“No,” she answers. The little goalkeeper manages to block a shot from one of her friends, and the frustrated brat punches her, and the two go down shouting and yelling. It looks like hair is being pulled. Varric would put money on the girl, she looks vicious.

“What’s so special about that sword, anyways?” Varric prompts -- it’s his last ditch attempt, after this he’s gonna call it a day and head back to the Hanged Man, he can’t waste all day trying to decrypt Hawke any more than he can spend a day trying to get answers out of a wall. Ironically, that’s the one that hits the jackpot.

Hawke pauses in her motions, and looks down at the rag in her hands. “There’s nothing 'special' about it,” she says. “It’s my officer’s sword, from the army.”

“Well, that sounds like it’s special, then,” Varric says.

“It’s not,” Hawke replies brusquely. She doesn’t start polishing it again. She hasn’t looked at Varric this entire time. The little girl who was keeping goal gets up with a bloody nose, and kicks her opponent while he’s down before picking up the ball and running past the pair of them to get inside. “It keeps them alive,” Hawke says, and it’s obviously enough who _they_ are with context. Her neck muscles look painful from how tight she’s holding herself. “It kills people - does what it was fucking made to do. That’s not special.”

“I mean, you can say that of any weapon,” the storyteller shrugs, and he brushes some soot and dirt off the collar of his coat - he’s only been in the old city slums for about fifteen minutes, and he’s already filthy. “But your last remaining link to your homeland? I’d call that special.”

The rag rips in Hawke’s hands, loud where she isn’t. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she says through clenched teeth. “You never cared about Orzammar. You didn’t give up shit. You’re an _author_ , man, don’t try and analyse me like one of your characters.”

Ho _ho._ Varric grits his teeth - damn, does he want to unpack all of that, but he gets the feeling they’d be here for days, and Hawke is never banished to the courtyard for long.

“Some way to talk to a concerned friend,” he says, and Hawke groans, carefully puts the sword back in its sheath, and buries her head in her hands.

“I just want everyone to leave me alone,” she says into her calloused palms, “Is that too much to fucking ask for? Just a single day without having to deal with my mother and my sister and their fucking ghosts.”

Yeah, Varric’s been there.

“You lost your brother in the Blight, right?” he asks - if it hadn’t been for Sunshine’s wistful memories of childhood pranks he’d never have known there was a Hawke brother at all; it’s not like the woman herself ever talks about him.

She still doesn’t talk now, just nods into her hands. He gets the feeling that if her hands were otherwise free, they’d be in his collar right now, pushing him against a wall. Eggshells, the walking on thereof, et cetera.

“You wanna -”

“No,” she cuts him off before he can even finish asking.

“Come on, Killer,” Varric cajoles.

“If I tell you will you go away?”

Varric considers this, leans back on his hands. Yeah, he figures he can throw her a bone here -- he doesn't want to alienate her completely. “Sure, Killer.”

The kids that haven’t gone home yet have reconvened into a game of tag, from what he can tell. The courtyard isn’t big enough for it, but that doesn’t stop them.

She pulls herself up and shakes her head like a dog, braids spilling over her shoulder. Squares up, like he’s one of the goons that Meeran sets her on. “He was Bethany’s twin,” Hawke says roughly, each word like it’s being punched out of her, faster than he’s ever heard her speak. “Youngest of us three. Joined the army when the Blight started. Didn’t make it.” She starts picking at the skin around her thumbnail, which already isn’t pretty. “Made it halfway to Gwaren before -- that’s --” she pinches the skin of her own elbow, hard, hard enough to immediately leave a mark, and Varric keeps his own face even and interested, although _fuck,_ are his fingers itching for a quill right now. “He was killed by an ogre. Ugliest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Survived eighteen years with --” she shakes her head, and Varric mentally substitutes that with _an apostate for a sister_ , “-- and the Battle of fucking Ostagar, and goes down three days later. His dog wouldn’t stop howling, wouldn’t even attack the thing. Some fucking guard dog, he just lied down on the body and cried. Wouldn’t come away for anything. We had to leave him.” She makes a face like she wants to sneeze. “That’s Mabari for you, I guess. Whatever. One less mouth to feed.”

Varric is suddenly very, very glad that he’s never asked them why they don’t have one, because otherwise the Hawkes seem to be every Fereldan stereotype there is. Fuck, imagine if he’d opened _that_ jar of mysteries. He’d have lost a tooth at the very least, very likely also a finger.

“Well,” he says. Someone’s mother calls to their sons from a window, and the game of tag disperses. The foundry around the corner belches more smog into the air. “That’s so sad I don’t even know what to say to it, Hawke.”

“They always fucking bring him up,” she says, and she finally looks him in the eye. “Not a day goes by in this goddamn city where I don’t have to hear about him.”

“Bertram’s like that, too,” Varric nods easily. “Mother this, father that, they’d be so ashamed if they could see you now, yadda yadda yadda.” He looks down at her sword again, and sees that the sheath is stamped with the seal of the Fereldan army. Not that he thought she was lying, but it’s good to have it confirmed.

“So, someone mentioned baby brother, you flipped, and got sent outside,” he surmises, checking one last time that he’s got his puzzle pieces in order, “And as always, you tended your sword to - what? Pass time? Don’t tell me it calms you, because no offense, but bullshit. Look at you, you’re wound tighter than Bianca.”

Hawke shrugs and picks at her nail beds again. “It needs doing,” she says. “Might as well. Weren’t you going to fuck off?”

“Come to the Hanged Man,” he says spontaneously. She snorts, but he means it; he’s getting more out of Hawke now than he has in the entire time he’s known her, and it’s not all good, but it’s certainly juicy. What a tragic hero she’ll make, he thinks, and by the Maker but he wants to see her take this city by storm. He doesn’t think it’s likely, but if anyone could, he reckons it’d be Killer. Besides all the weirdness around her family, there’s something to her -- a spark. The makings of a rise.

“I don’t need you buying drinks for me,” she says.

“Consider it repayment, for your generosity in sharing your feelings with me this fine afternoon,” Varric offers, and tips a fake hat to her gallantly. She punches him in the arm, hard, and he shakes his hand out with a mouthed _ow_. “I’m not betting on cards with you,” she says, but stands up anyways, and Varric counts it as a win.

He wonders if - no. But he’ll need to remember to talk to his editor once they’re back from the Deep Roads; Varric has an _idea_.

**Author's Note:**

> why am i still here


End file.
